Speaker 1: Lost worlds have always tugged firmly on the human imagination.
Speaker 1: For millennia, we've shared tales of forgotten places where time
Speaker 1: has not kept pace with history, where the clutter and
Speaker 1: conformity of the contemporary world do not hold sway. The
Speaker 1: most famous of all lost worlds is the mythical Atlantis,
Speaker 1: first introduced in Plato's Dialogs to Maeus and Critius around
Speaker 1: three hundred and sixty BCE. Atlantis is described as a
Speaker 1: utopian island nation home to an advanced seafaring society. After
Speaker 1: the Atlanteans supposedly went to war with Athens, the gods
Speaker 1: punished them with fire and flood, sinking their proud home
Speaker 1: Rome into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. For some,
Speaker 1: Atlantis is an allegory for the inevitable downfall that follows
Speaker 1: greed and hubris. For others, it is of very real civilization,
Speaker 1: lost to antiquity, but shining still in the imagination. There
Speaker 1: are other similar stories of sunken lands around the globe.
Speaker 1: Limyria a nation submerged beneath the Indian Ocean, move a
Speaker 1: fabled continent swallowed down by the Pacific. Then there is
Speaker 1: the El Dorado, the legendary South American city of Gold
Speaker 1: or Shambala, a mystical paradise of enlightenment hidden somewhere in
Speaker 1: the Himalayas. Taken together, these stories point to a deep
Speaker 1: rooted and universal desire to maintain some mystery in the world,
Speaker 1: a mystery under constant erosion by the unceasing march of
Speaker 1: technological development, and the human urge to explore, to fill
Speaker 1: in the map of the world with fact distances and details.
Speaker 1: But if the romance were squeezed out of our cartography,
Speaker 1: it snuck back in through our fiction. In eighteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: h Rider Haggard wrote King Solomon's Minds, often regarded as
Speaker 1: the origin of the modern lost world genre in the
Speaker 1: Western tradition, at least in it, Haggard's explorers, led by
Speaker 1: the undauntable Allan Quartermaine mount an arduous trek through an
Speaker 1: unmapped region of Central Africa in search of the fabled minds,
Speaker 1: confronting ancient, unknown cultures. Three decades later, Arthur Conan Doyle
Speaker 1: published The Lost World, in which another group of adventurers
Speaker 1: discover a bubble of prehistory lingering atop an Amazonian plateau,
Speaker 1: a microcosm of the past, full of ancient monsters and
Speaker 1: rugged cave people. But there are other hidden parts of
Speaker 1: the world and stories about them that reveal a darker truth.
Speaker 1: In Joseph Comrade's seminal novel The Heart of Darkness, Sailor
Speaker 1: Charles Marlowe speaks of his boyhood lust for adventure. Now,
Speaker 1: when I was a little chap there were many blank
Speaker 1: spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that
Speaker 1: looked particularly inviting on a map, I would put my
Speaker 1: finger on it and say, when I grow up, I
Speaker 1: will go there. But there was one yet, the biggest,
Speaker 1: the most blank, so to speak, that I had a
Speaker 1: hankering after. That blank space on Marlowe's map was the
Speaker 1: Congo Basin, an area of one point one million square
Speaker 1: miles deep in central Africa, home to the world's second
Speaker 1: largest rainforest, deepest river, and a huge range of flora
Speaker 1: and fauna. It is a place that perhaps most represents
Speaker 1: the stereotypical mystery and untamed wildness long attached to Africa
Speaker 1: in the white European mind. The story is essentially an
Speaker 1: account of Marlow's steamship journey up the Congo River in
Speaker 1: search of the enigmatic Kurts, a sinister European ivory trader.
Speaker 1: But as is so often the case, what Marlowe had
Speaker 1: once viewed as an unknown space was rather simply unknown
Speaker 1: to him. In reality, it was already populated by hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of people, and the only strange and monstrous
Speaker 1: things he discovered there were the brutal acts being perpose
Speaker 1: traded on them. For Marlowe, the Congo ceased to be
Speaker 1: a blank space of delightful mystery, and instead had become
Speaker 1: a place of darkness. But there is a parallel story
Speaker 1: to this sphere of dense forest and deep water, one
Speaker 1: told over centuries by local Congolese and explorers alike, a
Speaker 1: story that calls into question what we truly know about
Speaker 1: our world and what may lurk still in the parts
Speaker 1: of the map that have yet to be fully filled.
Speaker 1: In You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McLean Smith.
Speaker 1: In the seventeen sixties, abbe Levan Bonaventure Proia, a French
Speaker 1: writer and cleric, worked as a missionary in the Congo basin.
Speaker 1: Years later, after returning to France, he wrote a book
Speaker 1: detailing his experience of the region and compiling his fellow
Speaker 1: missionaries knowledge of its natural wonders. No doubt, this book,
Speaker 1: titled a History of Lango, Cocongo and other Kingdoms of Africa,
Speaker 1: would have slipped into total obscurity were it not for
Speaker 1: one enigmatic passage. Missionaries Proyar Rites have observed passing along
Speaker 1: a forest the trail of an animal they have never seen,
Speaker 1: but which must be monstrous. The marks of its claws
Speaker 1: were noted upon the earth, and these composed a footprint
Speaker 1: of about three feet in circumference. By observing the disposition
Speaker 1: of his footsteps, it was recognized that he was not running,
Speaker 1: and he carried his legs at the distance of seven
Speaker 1: to eight feet apart. Proyar does not elaborate further. It
Speaker 1: gives no additional details and what this unnamed creature is
Speaker 1: or what it supposedly looks like. This is nonetheless considered
Speaker 1: the first written reference to a creature known as morkel
Speaker 1: and Bembe, Africa's most infamous undiscovered animal, or in modern
Speaker 1: terminology cryptid. In the oral traditions of the local Bantu people,
Speaker 1: the mockle and Bembe is alternatively spirit allegory or flesh
Speaker 1: and blood creature. One tale goes that during a bloody
Speaker 1: bout of tribal warfare, a band of Congolese pigmies were
Speaker 1: fleeing through the rainforest when they reached a river too
Speaker 1: wide and dangerous to cross with pursuers on their trail,
Speaker 1: They were caught until a broad back breached the river's surface,
Speaker 1: a living bridge that the pigmase scrambled across to safety.
Speaker 1: Other accounts present the macklay and bembey as a very
Speaker 1: real and much less benign entity, but in either case
Speaker 1: reference is always made to its grand site. In the
Speaker 1: Lingala language, mockle and bembe means one who stops the
Speaker 1: flow of rivers. In nineteen thirteen, a German explorer visited
Speaker 1: what is now modern day Cameroon. The man Ludwig Freiheer
Speaker 1: von steins u Lausnitz was on a government funded mission
Speaker 1: to survey the German colonies. While trekking the bush, Ludwig
Speaker 1: heard recurrent tales of a mysterious animal feared by natives
Speaker 1: of the neighboring Congo. He was particularly astounded that these
Speaker 1: accounts came from such experienced guides, who, despite coming from
Speaker 1: different tribes separated by many miles of dense rainforest or
Speaker 1: relaid similar details. The creature was said to inhabit shallow
Speaker 1: waters and the exposed banks of sharp river bends. According
Speaker 1: to cautionary tales, if anyone was unwary or unlucky enough
Speaker 1: to paddle close to the creature's lair, the mokele and
Speaker 1: Bembe would rush forth and destroy the canoes and the
Speaker 1: people inside them with a heavy swipe of its tail.
Speaker 1: It never ate the bodies, though they were left undisturbed
Speaker 1: the floating detritus of the apparent beast's extreme territorialism, and
Speaker 1: while local tribespeople spoke of the mochle and Bembe as
Speaker 1: capable of hunting and killing an elephant, they were never
Speaker 1: known to devour the carcass. Indeed, the mochle and Bembe
Speaker 1: was said to enjoy an exclusively herbivorous diet, climbing laboriously
Speaker 1: up the bank of the river to feast on the
Speaker 1: local foliage. In particular, it is said to have a
Speaker 1: taste for the mulumbo, an apple like fruit common to
Speaker 1: the banks of rivers and lakes. To the people of
Speaker 1: the Congo, the mochele and Bembe simply was an oversized
Speaker 1: part of their ecosystem, like an elephant or a hippo,
Speaker 1: and they described it with the same level of consistency. Supposedly,
Speaker 1: the animal was very large, with a body a little
Speaker 1: bigger than an adult elephant, covered in smooth, scaleless skin.
Speaker 1: A small head sat at the end of a long,
Speaker 1: sinuous neck, and it wielded an alligator like tail thick
Speaker 1: with mussel. To Western explorers, however, physical discs scriptions of
Speaker 1: the apparent monster, coupled with its eating habits, hinted at
Speaker 1: an alluring, alarming question. Does a dinosaur live on the
Speaker 1: so called lost world of the Congo basin? One man
Speaker 1: attempted to find out. Professor Roy Mackell arrived in the
Speaker 1: Congo for the first time in January nineteen eighty, a
Speaker 1: respected biologist recently retired from the University of Chicago. He
Speaker 1: was also vice president of the International Society of Cryptozoology
Speaker 1: under world authority on the topic of the Lochness Monster.
Speaker 1: Having grown tired of the endless, unrewarded search for NeSSI,
Speaker 1: Mackell turned his attention to Africa after his friend, the
Speaker 1: herpetologist James Powell, related a story he once heard from
Speaker 1: a Bantu folk healer. The healer had told Old Powell
Speaker 1: of a great jungle beast, a source of terror and
Speaker 1: owe for the Bantu people. Keen to identify the creature,
Speaker 1: Paw presented the healer with a picture book of animals.
Speaker 1: The healer looked on passively as Paw turned the page
Speaker 1: on one animal after another, when finally he told Paw
Speaker 1: to stop, energetically pointing to one particular image on a page.
Speaker 1: It was a picture of a Diplodocus, a sauropod dinosaur
Speaker 1: measuring on average twenty seven meters long and four and
Speaker 1: a half meters tour that went extinct one hundred and
Speaker 1: forty five million years ago, and so Intrigued and buoyed
Speaker 1: by the implications, Macaw and Powell made their way together
Speaker 1: to the Republic of Congo. Starting from the city of
Speaker 1: Ifondo in the northeast, the two friends began a month
Speaker 1: long trek through the Licoala Swamp, a vast expanse of
Speaker 1: over fifty five thousand maize like square miles of rivers,
Speaker 1: shallow lakes, and low lying islands, as impenetrable to western
Speaker 1: tourists as it is perfect for a semi aquatic lizard.
Speaker 1: Their guide was Marion Nicole, a local pigmy whose help
Speaker 1: would prove essential. As mocel and Bembay believers have argued,
Speaker 1: the Likohala Swamp region is highly suitable for a large
Speaker 1: prehistoric species to survive and breed in small populations. Not
Speaker 1: only is it supremely isolated, it has remained almost unchanged
Speaker 1: since the Cretaceous period, with a stable climate, minimal tectonic disruption,
Speaker 1: and virtually no movement from its proximity to the equator. Here,
Speaker 1: Macal argued a herd of dinosaurs could potentially go was
Speaker 1: unnoticed as a swarm of insects. But it hadn't gone unnoticed,
Speaker 1: as McAll and Powell quickly discovered while they trekked from
Speaker 1: town to town. Stories of Maclay and Bembe encounters were
Speaker 1: not hard to come by. One Bantu man, Furman Mossamele,
Speaker 1: told them how as a young boy, he'd disturbed the
Speaker 1: animal paddling near the town of Epina before he fled
Speaker 1: in terror. Furman saw a small head rise from the river,
Speaker 1: followed by a serpentine neck and broad ruddy back, just
Speaker 1: like Powell's healer. Furman also pointed to a depiction of
Speaker 1: a sauropod dinosaur in a book as the nearest comparison
Speaker 1: to what he saw. Another first hand account from a
Speaker 1: hunter named Nicholas Mondongo described a ruddy red river monster
Speaker 1: standing in water only a few feet deep. He told
Speaker 1: the fascinated researchers that the creature was at least ten
Speaker 1: meters from its head to the tip of its thick tail,
Speaker 1: and he too recognized the mochelae and bembe in the
Speaker 1: drawings of the Diplodocus and other sauropods. Mikail had begun
Speaker 1: his expedition with skepticism about the idea of a surviving
Speaker 1: modern day dinosaur. However, after contemplating the scale of the
Speaker 1: unexplored rainforest and hearing from more witnesses who each pointed
Speaker 1: eagerly to pictures of surapods, he flew home with a
Speaker 1: firm conviction something unknown was roaming the interior of the
Speaker 1: Congo Basin. In October nineteen eighty one, Macau returned to Africa,
Speaker 1: determined to find definitive roof This time, he headed up
Speaker 1: a larger team, which included his International Society of Cryptosymology
Speaker 1: colleague Richard Greenwell of Congolese biologist doctor Marcellan and Nanya,
Speaker 1: and pastor Eugene Thomas, an American missionary who'd lived in
Speaker 1: the country since the late fifties and who claimed to
Speaker 1: have heard over fifty first hand reports of the apparent creature.
Speaker 1: German electrical engineer and avid proponent of the mckelay and
Speaker 1: Bembey theory, Hermann Regustas was also supposed to join the party,
Speaker 1: providing vital expertise and the ability to employ satellite tracking. Sadly, however,
Speaker 1: for reasons unknown, he and Macaw fell out, and he
Speaker 1: neglected to join the team on their quest. Under turret,
Speaker 1: macau moved forward. This time, he decided to refine the
Speaker 1: search area, choosing to focus on the waterways and swamp
Speaker 1: land itself. As their trip began at the end of
Speaker 1: the rainy season, water levels were high enough to allow
Speaker 1: the group to travel by river, faster than the previous
Speaker 1: year's overland journey and closer to the habitat that the
Speaker 1: creature would ostensibly call home. The team traveled in perogues,
Speaker 1: long narrow canoes carved from a single tree trunk. Parogues
Speaker 1: sit very low in the water, with only an inch
Speaker 1: or two of draft, but their stability and maneuverability makes
Speaker 1: them the vessel of choice for Bantu and Pygmy river communities.
Speaker 1: The group's initial aim was to reach Lake Telee, a
Speaker 1: remote lake thought to be a particular haunt of the
Speaker 1: Macklay and Bembey. As rumor had it, it was there
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty that a group of Bogombay pigmies felt
Speaker 1: one of the creatures us using long spears. Only no
Speaker 1: sooner had they begun feasting on the carcass. One by one,
Speaker 1: the group as said to have collapsed and died due
Speaker 1: to a deadly poison said to saturate the creature's flesh.
Speaker 1: Even without the threat of poison, the Bogombay Pygmy story
Speaker 1: is the only account of the enigmatic beast being brought
Speaker 1: down by humans, and without spears or hunting expertise of
Speaker 1: their own, there was no doubt. The Macal party set
Speaker 1: out with no little trepidation as they headed back into
Speaker 1: the swamp. Embarking from Pastor Thomas's mission, Macau's team first
Speaker 1: canoed southwest down the Tanga River and then south on
Speaker 1: the larger le Koala o Zerb River. At some point
Speaker 1: Macau heard a loud splash from near the bank. He
Speaker 1: turned quickly to see a sizeable rogue wave come cresting
Speaker 1: across from the shadowy vine encrusted overhang. The river. Water
Speaker 1: washed across their pirogues, prompting the guides to scream out
Speaker 1: in terror Mochle and Bembe. Mockele and Bembey with great persistence,
Speaker 1: Macau just about managed to convince them not to flee.
Speaker 1: After a half hour search, the team found no evidence
Speaker 1: or tracks with which to identify whatever had created the wave.
Speaker 1: Either way, the nervous guide e Cole assured the team
Speaker 1: that of all the creatures it might have been, crocodiles
Speaker 1: do not create waves when they enter the water, elephants
Speaker 1: do not fully submerge themselves, and no hippos were known
Speaker 1: to inhabit that section of the le Koala. When Macau
Speaker 1: asked how the guide knew the no hippos in the area,
Speaker 1: his response was swift and matter of fact. The Mokel
Speaker 1: and Bembey had chased them all away, he said. Some
Speaker 1: time later, the expedition reached the confluence of the Lekoala,
Speaker 1: o Zerb and the Uncharted River. By Here they established
Speaker 1: a base and visited several local villages, gathering more eyewitness testimony.
Speaker 1: In total, they collected more than thirty independent reports of
Speaker 1: apparent encounters with the Macklay and Bembey. One hunter escorted
Speaker 1: Macau to a stretch of river bank where he discovered
Speaker 1: a large trail that he couldn't identify. Some large animal
Speaker 1: had clearly dredged itself from the river and headed into
Speaker 1: the surrounding jungle, leaving foot wide clawed prints. The size
Speaker 1: of the path it created was roughly the same as
Speaker 1: that made by an elephant, But elephants do not have claws,
Speaker 1: and the hunter emphasized that neither did they devastate the
Speaker 1: plant life in quite the way this creature had. Feeling
Speaker 1: confident they were on the cusp of a discovery, Macaal
Speaker 1: and his team aimed to push on to Lake Telley. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: to their great disappointment, they learned how fallible the maps
Speaker 1: of the local region had up till then been. As
Speaker 1: it turned out, the river they were on was not
Speaker 1: the northern reach of the Bye River as they had thought,
Speaker 1: and to reach Lake Telley from their position would require
Speaker 1: an overland slog through the most inhospitable terrain, equipped only
Speaker 1: for a river journey, they had no choice but to
Speaker 1: turn back. Macaw's great search for the dinosaur of the
Speaker 1: Congo had reached an anticlimactic end. He flew back to
Speaker 1: the u s no less persuaded of the creature's existence,
Speaker 1: but with the heavy awareness that none of the evidence
Speaker 1: he collected would convince the zoological community. Roy Macaw's nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty seven book A Living Dinosaur in Search of Mockelay
Speaker 1: and Bembe, which he subsequently wrote, did much to promote
Speaker 1: the idea of prehistoric survival into the present day, though
Speaker 1: macau was ultimately forced to concede that though the mystery
Speaker 1: beckons pending new information from future expeditions, our speculations must
Speaker 1: rest here. But Roy mackel had not been the only
Speaker 1: cryptozoologist scourring the swamps for monsters after their falling out.
Speaker 1: Herm and Rougustus, the German satellite specialists, had initiated his
Speaker 1: own expedition, which also took place in the autumn of
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty one. In fact, Ermine had started a four
Speaker 1: month before. Like Mackel, Ermine also centered his attention on
Speaker 1: the elusive Lake Telley, but he was successful in reaching it.
Speaker 1: His team, which included his wife Kia in the role
Speaker 1: as chief medical officer, arrived there on October twenty eighth,
Speaker 1: when Mackel was still days from setting out on the river.
Speaker 1: Seen from above, Lake Telley is a great shining disk,
Speaker 1: two miles wide and enclosed on all sides by a
Speaker 1: limitless blanket of trees. To some it looks like a
Speaker 1: vast eye staring up from a dark green face, the
Speaker 1: inlets and rivers running to and from it like scars.
Speaker 1: It is here that the mochll Bembe is thought to
Speaker 1: make its home. On the afternoon of their first day,
Speaker 1: Rmin and Kia noticed sizeable waves radiating in the otherwise
Speaker 1: calm water. However, it wasn't possible to see the source
Speaker 1: of the disturbance that day, but the following morning, one
Speaker 1: of the party believed they spotted a long, neck like
Speaker 1: protuberance stretching out from the lake. It stayed in view
Speaker 1: for a full five minutes before sinking out of sight.
Speaker 1: It was a week later when Herman and Kia heard
Speaker 1: a frightening noise emanating from the jungle around their shore
Speaker 1: side camp. It began as a low roar which increased
Speaker 1: in volume and violence to a deep throated, trumpeting growl.
Speaker 1: As they described it, the couple sat in their canoe,
Speaker 1: rooted with fascination and fear as whatever made the noise
Speaker 1: could be heard plowing through the trees, growling and battering
Speaker 1: vegetation as it went. On November twenty seventh, after a
Speaker 1: full month on the Lake Kia, claint have glimpsed a long,
Speaker 1: sinuous appendage rising from the water, topped with a large
Speaker 1: snakelike head. She estimated it to be over six and
Speaker 1: a half feet in length. It apparently swayed in full
Speaker 1: view as if waving to the awestruck woman, before sinking,
Speaker 1: as ever, beneath the surface. Sadly, for all these sightings,
Speaker 1: the Augustus expedition gathered no photographic or physical evidence. Hermann
Speaker 1: blamed human error and humidity, and though he returned home
Speaker 1: convinced of the existence of a relict dinosaur, his anecdotal
Speaker 1: reports caused barely a stir. Two years after the Macal
Speaker 1: and Rugusta expeditions, another team battled their way to the
Speaker 1: shores of Lake Telley, but this time people paid attention.
Speaker 1: Marcellan and Nanya was the Congolese zoologist who was part
Speaker 1: of Macal's second expedition. He also had a government role
Speaker 1: in the Ministry of Water and Forests. As such, he
Speaker 1: was well placed and well provisioned to pursue his determined
Speaker 1: search for the mackl and Bembe. In April nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: he put together a seven person Congolese only team, whose
Speaker 1: every member was familiar with the ecosystem they were set
Speaker 1: to explore once again. The hunters were drawn towards Lake Telley,
Speaker 1: like blood towards the heart. After days of canoeing and
Speaker 1: trekking through dense jungle, they finally arrived and promptly set
Speaker 1: up camp. On the second day of their stakeout, the
Speaker 1: group observed a huge turtle near to their bank. By
Speaker 1: Annanya's reckoning, it was over six feet long, easily double
Speaker 1: the size of the commonly recognized African soft shell turtle.
Speaker 1: Though some have wondered if this might in fact be
Speaker 1: the root of the whole Mokelly and Benbe story, nothing
Speaker 1: but an oversized turtle transformed through the prism of frightened
Speaker 1: imaginations into something even grander. The truth is, the giant
Speaker 1: turtle already has its own name and folklore attached the
Speaker 1: endn Deci. They call it a creature in many ways,
Speaker 1: just as fabled as the Mocklae and Bembey, And so
Speaker 1: it would seem, even without offering up a surviving dinosaur,
Speaker 1: Lake Hell was all already living up to its reputation
Speaker 1: as a lost world of the Arthur Conan Doyle variety. Then,
Speaker 1: on the third day May one, the dinosaur is said
Speaker 1: to have made its presence known, and Nanya was filming
Speaker 1: a troop of monkeys on the lake shore when he
Speaker 1: heard one of his party crying out in excitement. Dashing
Speaker 1: to the water's edge, he was stunned to see just
Speaker 1: under three hundred meters off shore the rising neck and
Speaker 1: back of a huge animal, and Nanya strode into the
Speaker 1: water and toward the creature, feeling a jolt of adrenaline
Speaker 1: when he saw its head turn at the sound of
Speaker 1: his approach sixty meters in, and Nanya stopped and raised
Speaker 1: his camera through the magnified lens. He later said he
Speaker 1: took in all the details that he'd heard locals repeat
Speaker 1: again and again. A foot long neck topped with an
Speaker 1: undersized snakelike head with crocodilian eyes, its skin shaded from
Speaker 1: its ruddy head down, a brown neck turning black across
Speaker 1: its hump, and the ten feet of its back. In total,
Speaker 1: the creature, he claimed, was over five meters in length.
Speaker 1: It sank for a moment beneath the water, he later said,
Speaker 1: only for its neck to soon re emerge and stay
Speaker 1: visible for a full twenty minutes. In this time, the
Speaker 1: zoologist determined that he was looking at something reptilian rather
Speaker 1: than mammalian, and felt compelled to conclude that it did
Speaker 1: indeed look very much like a sauropod dinosaur. When Marcellan
Speaker 1: and Nanyas Mochli and Bembe finally submerged fully into the water,
Speaker 1: his team apparently rushed to its last location in their pirogue,
Speaker 1: but saw nothing beneath the dense vegetable matter that gathered
Speaker 1: at the surface of the lake. It was when they
Speaker 1: arrived back at the shore that Ananya claimed to make
Speaker 1: the crushing discovery that he'd accidentally filmed the whole encounter
Speaker 1: with an entirely inappropriate focus setting, having neglected to change
Speaker 1: it after filming the monkeys. When he eventually apparently watched
Speaker 1: the footage back, it displayed only an impenetrable blurry image
Speaker 1: he did take several photos with a small thirty five
Speaker 1: millimeter camera. However, his grainy images of something dark breaking
Speaker 1: the surface of the lake have garnered both support and
Speaker 1: condemnation over the years. There the search for Central Africa
Speaker 1: living dinosaur could have rested in the uncertain ground between
Speaker 1: anecdote myth and compromised evidence. But there is just something
Speaker 1: about those empty places on the map human beings cannot
Speaker 1: keep away. Other expeditions have followed over the last forty years,
Speaker 1: plenty of them, most failed valiantly to gain any greater
Speaker 1: evidence than Roy mackel, Hermann, Rugusta's or Marcellan and Anya.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety two, a Japanese film crew recorded fifteen
Speaker 1: seconds of video showing something long and distinctly serpentine swimming
Speaker 1: across Lake Telley's glassy surface. It remains the most compelling
Speaker 1: sign that something unknown still calls the lake its home.
Speaker 1: But it is worth noting that Mocklay and Bembe is
Speaker 1: not the only prehistoric relic reported from the Congo. Other
Speaker 1: tales tell of the cassai rex, a ferocious carnival able
Speaker 1: to kill rhinos, and the Ammela and Tuca, a horned
Speaker 1: reptile as large as a bush elephant, with a striking
Speaker 1: resemblance to the triceratops. And then there is the Kanga motto,
Speaker 1: a huge bird with a seven foot wingspan, scaled rather
Speaker 1: than feathered. It is said to attack the boats of
Speaker 1: those that venture too far into the rivers and trees.
Speaker 1: When European explorers showed them images of prehistoric pterosaurs, the
Speaker 1: local people didn't react with or as others had to
Speaker 1: the Mochele and Bembe. Instead, they seemed terrified. Lost world, then,
Speaker 1: is perhaps the wrong term to be lost. Something must
Speaker 1: first be found and known. We can be lost, and
Speaker 1: we may well be should we tread too far into
Speaker 1: the interior of the Central African rainforest. But the things
Speaker 1: that we may meet there have always corded home. This
Speaker 1: episode was written by Neil McRobert and produced by me
Speaker 1: Richard mclin smith. Neil is the creator and host of
Speaker 1: his own brilliant podcast called Talking Scared, in which he
Speaker 1: discusses the craft of horror, writing with everyone from Ta
Speaker 1: Nanaeeve Do to the god of horror himself, Stephen King.
Speaker 1: I can't recommend it highly enough. Thank you as ever
Speaker 1: for listening to the show. Please subscribe and rate it
Speaker 1: if you haven't already done so. Unexplained will be coming
Speaker 1: to YouTube very shortly in video form, so please watch
Speaker 1: out for future developments there. You can subscribe to the
Speaker 1: channel at YouTube dot com, Forward Slash at Unexplained Pod.
Speaker 1: You can also now find us on TikTok at TikTok
Speaker 1: dot com. Forward Slash at Unexplained Podcast. Unexplained is an
Speaker 1: AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard mcclainsmith. All other
Speaker 1: elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced
Speaker 1: by me Richard mcclainsmith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is
Speaker 1: now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon,
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Speaker 1: and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and
Speaker 1: feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or
Speaker 1: ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps
Speaker 1: you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share.
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